No shouting.

No scene.

Four words. I did it for us. I have turned them over many times since, and they still strike me as the most honest thing anyone said that entire day.

Because in those four words the whole architecture of my marriage stood suddenly exposed.

There was a we, and I was not in it.

There had been a we for a long time, longer than I had let myself know, and my husband and this woman had built it in hotel rooms charged to a company my father founded, and the head-shaving was not an aberration but a declaration — a violent, unmistakable notice that the we had decided I was in the way.